In “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste,” Ezra Pound cautions poets against veering into abstraction and abandoning the primacy of the image, insisting that “the natural object is always the adequate symbol.” An image gifts an “emotional complex in an instant of time,” which, Pound argues, engenders “a sense of sudden liberation.” In other words, an image is self-revealing and thus self-transcending. It needs only itself to rise above its own weight.
I often think of this idea in relation to the late Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer, whose work rests so comfortably—and yet so impossibly—in this instant. At once avant-garde and traditional, his poetry straddles the worldly occasional and the metaphysical, the ordinary and the numinous, standing, as it does, in the space between waiting and revelation.
Read Full Article »